


3:26

by malevon



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:40:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24030697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malevon/pseuds/malevon
Summary: in which oliver makes a friend
Kudos: 4





	3:26

**Author's Note:**

> hi, and welcome to my final project for my creative writing class this semester! this story has been in the works since January and some parts of it are even older than that, but I’m really happy with how it came out (and I hope my professor is too haha)
> 
> very special thank you to @vampiriic/@vampiricarus on tumblr for letting me take care of sadie for so long. thank you thank you thank you

Oliver’s quick—always has been.

Going out for track just felt natural to him, and damn, he was good at it. His endurance, however, has never been great, so things like cross country were inaccessible to him, but the sprints? That’s where he shines. For a solid twelve seconds—eleven, if he trains a little harder, pushes himself a little further this summer—it’s just him and the track and the heavylight pounding of his feet on the ground, and no conversations to be had because while he’s quick on the track, he’s slow on the uptake, sometimes. 

He stares Sadie Marks in the face, awed, confused. He’s  _ very _ slow on the uptake—Sadie is the one who has to speak first.

“What are you doing?” she asks, the words leaving her mouth in the steady hiss of fog in the air that suggests to Oliver that maybe she didn’t expect to see him in the woods at three in the afternoon, covered in mud, on the ground, winded from running from the  _ thing _ that had been chasing him, the thing that—that Sadie just slammed 30 feet away with a powerful swing of a baseball bat. 

Oliver stands up—a little too quickly, he realizes, as he is chastised by the sudden dizzy spell that washes over him, he didn’t realize how hard he had hit the ground—and throws his hands up innocently. “Sadie Marks, from statistics class!” he says, laughing. “Did you need some, uh, help with the homework? Strange place to go looking for a tutor if you ask—”

“What are you  _ doing _ ?” she promptly cuts him off. “I’ve been hunting that thing for days. It’s been seriously affecting my sleep schedule. I’ve been hunting it for days, and you have the gall to just… be  _ chased _ by it?”

“What—?”

She cuts him off again. “Okay, yes, Oliver Glyn from statistics class, yes, I hunt monsters, you’ve probably never seen them, please don’t worry about it and pretend this never happened.”

“Okay, well, that’s not possible considering I just—you just whapped it with that—that thing,” he vaguely gestures towards Sadie’s bat, which he is just now realizing is wrapped in barbed wire and held precariously together with haphazard nails. “And you just expect me to forget about this?”

“I mean, yeah,” Sadie furrows her brows at him. “Unless you want to join in. I’ve been meaning to find a partner, but yeah, I’d rather people either not know about it, or be with me in it, you know.”

“It’s—it’s just you?” he stutters. “How long has it been? How long has this been an issue?”

“I’m not going to answer that,” Sadie says stubbornly. “Not unless you get in with me on this.”

“Okay, fine,” Oliver agrees. He does not agree. It is not fine. “Tell me.”

Sadie narrows her eyes at him. “I don’t believe you.”

Oliver narrows his eyes right back. It’s probably not as intimidating as he wants it to be, considering his glasses are still askew. “Fine,” he says, crossing his arms. “I’ll go tell… I don’t know, the police, I guess? Animal control?” His voice and his gaze drop as he talks himself into a hole. He’s so confused. “Who would I even call about this?”

“Sometimes there are monsters around, and I kill them,” Sadie cuts him off before he can ramble on any longer than he needs to. “That’s it. Are you in or are you out?”

Was he in or was he out?

Oliver stares at her, this girl in front of him that’s a key to this new world he knew nothing about until three minutes ago and  _ still  _ feels like he knows nothing about it, and finds himself intrigued. He’s intrigued in a way that he hasn’t been in a while, despite the fact that daily, he learns more and more about the workings of the human body. This, though; this is otherworldly. Unknown. And Oliver can’t resist that.

His words are honest in a way that surprises him: “I’m in.”

Sadie Marks grins and extends a hand. Oliver takes it, shakes it, and feels like he’s just made a very heavy deal.

“We’ll need to get you a weapon.”

———————————

“I don’t know about you, but I feel like I was just chased through the woods for about a mile by a—what was it? An imp? Yeah, an imp. I’m ready to go home and sleep for about twenty hours. Walk with me back to my truck?”

“You drive a  _ truck _ ?” 

“Yes!” Oliver shoots back defensively, taking steps through the foliage. “She’s a pickup, and I love her.”

“Well, ain’t that just the most country thing I’ve ever heard,” Sadie replies, an exaggerated country accent dripping from her tongue like honey. And then, in her normal voice, around a boisterous laugh that echoes through the branches, “You have to let me call you ‘Oli’ now. That’s way more country-sounding than ‘Oliver.’”

“Nope. Only my sister, who is, like, nine, calls me that. Not my moms, and definitely not my friends.” His tone is serious, but he’s smiling all the while.

“How about your monster-hunting buddies?”

Oliver looks at her, and she is smirking devilishly.

———————————

Oliver’s quick to reach in his pocket and turn off his ringer when his phone goes off in O-chem.

He doesn’t check it until afterwards, when he’s power-walking between his 2:30 and his 3:30 class, and his eyebrows raise at the sender. She’s supposed to be in class at this time, but he’s not surprised at her texting him.

_ coffee today? _

_ i think i have something new and also this stats work sucks ass oli i would love your valuable tutelage _

He perks at that. “Something new,” when it came to Sadie and their newfound shared hobby, meant that she had found something for them to look into, something for them to research, to dig into its lore and find out what it wanted and how to get rid of it efficiently. Something to distract him from chemistry and statistics, in the very least.

He types out a quick response, and then it’s not long before he’s sipping his iced americano with matcha powder (“Oli,” Sadie says, looking at his sewage-water-colored coffee shop order, “that looks disgusting.” “Don’t knock it till you try it” _ ,  _ he responds confidently, which only prompts her to take it from his side of the table and sip from it, raising her eyebrows in reluctant acceptance) and poring over the permutations homework with Sadie. 

Between genuine question-and-answer interactions in which they bounce ideas off of each other and complain about their professor, Sadie quietly, discreetly slips in information about a new target: a chimera, she says, it has to be. 

It has to be this answer, Oliver says, showing her his work, explaining the way he deconstructed the equation and watching her follow in his steps, and he asks her, do you understand, are you following my  _ tracks? _

Yeah, this  _ tracks,  _ she answers, then lets her pencil hover above the paper for a moment. She’s thinking, Oliver can see it. Deer and some kind of small mountain lion, she thinks, she says, whispers over the loud whir of an espresso machine. If people heard them talking about the imp, the chimera, they would think that the two of them were delusional—or worse, members of the tabletop gaming club. Do you want to go out tomorrow night, she asks, and Oliver is so taken aback by her seeming forwardness that he forgets himself before nodding and taking another long sip of his coffee. 

This is hardly the first time they’ve met up and discussed a target. Sadie is avidly knowledgeable about hunting and killing the things, and eagerly took Oliver under her wing when he expressed interest—he thought it was fun, gratifying in its own strange way. There were things going bump in the night, and Oliver Glyn, a lanky bio student and member of the track team, had the ability to take care of them.

In the past several weeks, almost two months, they’ve successfully hunted down and killed nightcrawlers, more imps that got too confident and almost formed a colony too large for them to handle, even a werewolf once—they had been very careful to make sure that latter one wasn’t actually a human, first. That prospect had stressed him out, but Sadie had reassured him: if it had gone far enough to stay a werewolf for this long and to become this violent, then whatever human form it had—if it even had one to begin with—had been gone long enough for them to kill it. 

(They’d buried it after they killed it, and that had been the first time Oliver had seen Sadie so shaken up by a hunt.)

He’s snapped, literally, back into reality when she flicks her fingers in front of where his arms are crossed on the table.

“Oli,” she says, and she takes a quick sip of her iced latte, which looks to be more milk and sugar than coffee. “Come on, wake up, what’s  _ n _ in this equation?”

“Oh, uh, sorry,” he shakes his head sheepishly, his glasses falling askew for a second before he catches them. “Here, let me show you again.”

———————————

It had been going so well.

So well, Oliver had thought; they had been balancing everything so perfectly. Nobody suspected a thing, they had never been found out, they had never been  _ hurt _ —at least, not bad enough to where someone would notice.

Stupidly, these are all Oliver’s first thoughts when he feels the ground beneath him slip and disappear, and the distorted laughter of the siren mixed with Sadie’s surprised call of his name all meld together in his mind as he tumbles down the slick ravine. They are his last thoughts when his forehead knocks into something and there is only darkness.

  
  


He wakes up to a bright light in his eyes and the muffled sound of someone’s—Sadies?—voice. The ground beneath him is cold, but his head feels warm, and damn does it  _ hurt.  _

“Hey, hey, Oliver?”

Definitely Sadie’s voice. He groans and brings a hand to his head, only to feel it come back warm and wet. He’s warm. Why is he warm?

“Because you just fell down, like, a 20-foot slope and your head is bleeding.”

Had he been talking out loud?

“Yes, you’re talking out loud—Oli, are you okay? Do I need to take you somewhere?”

Sadie’s voice is shaky, and Oliver can see her hands hovering around him as if she’s wondering where to put them, what to do. 

“Think ‘m concussion,” he says, his words coming out slurred and uneven. He doesn’t know if he’s concussed. He’s never been concussed before. What does a concussion even feel like? He’s suddenly really, really tired.

“Concussion, okay. Okay, I’m gonna call 911 now because I don’t know what to do and you  _ definitely  _ don’t know what to do and—hey, Oliver, hey, stay awake. I don’t think you’re supposed to go to sleep.”

Oliver groans again. He’s so tired.

He can hear Sadie’s phone conversation, the words coming to his ears as though he’s underwater. What had happened? They were fighting, fighting something, and it had pushed him backwards—

“Okay, they’re telling me to keep you awake,” Sadie snaps at him, jostling his arm. It hurts a little bit. “What—okay, Oliver, can you move your legs?”

What a weird question. Yeah, of course he can.

“Oh, thank God. Yeah, he can,” he hears Sadie say, then goes back to looking up at the sky, obscured by the pine treetops. His head just really, really, really, really hurts. 

“Okay, okay, yeah. Yeah. Thank you,” he hears her say, and then there’s that bright light in his eyes again. “Sorry. They said to keep you awake, so I don’t know what else to do.”

“I’ll stay ‘wake.”

“No you won’t.” He feels flicking on his arm that eventually changes to light slaps on his shoulders. Oliver’s body doesn’t stop being jostled, and it’s honestly just a little annoying. “They’ll be here pretty soon. We’re not that far from the road, so they’re gonna come and help you out of here. Do you want to try and stand up, maybe walk a little?”

That sounds terrible. His head is pounding. “No, I jus’ got’ study,” he says with as much vindication as a concussed college student can. “Got’ test nex’ week.”

“Oh, God, okay. Oh boy. We can deal with that later.” He feels one of his hands be grabbed and clenched. “Just stay awake. Stay awake.”

He tries. He really does.

  
  


The next time he wakes up is when he’s being put onto a stretcher and into an ambulance. He’s not awake long enough to hear Sadie trying to explain what happened, but that’s okay. He’s just really tired.

  
  


The next time he wakes up, he’s in a hospital bed. His mind is less fuzzy, and his head hurts less. “Shit,” is the only eloquent thing he can think to say. 

The window to his right shows him a street he finds he recognizes; he’s at an urgent care center, the one right off of campus. There’s a nurse there who hears his whispered expletive and turns to him, smiling. 

“Mr. Glyn,” she starts, taking a small light and flashing it into his eyes, finding it satisfactory when he flinches and pulls away. “You took quite the spill, I heard?”

“What—?”

She ignores his question and begins making the rounds, checking his vitals. There’s already a strap wrapped around his bicep, and the increasing pressure as the nurse dials it up incrementally makes him more awake. “Luckily,” she begins again, “you’re not concussed. We’ll keep you here for a couple more hours before sending you back. Do you have someone you can contact to bring you anything you need, or to bring you home?”

Oliver groans. This sucks. His head  _ hurts. _

“Sadie,” he says, the name leaving his mouth before he has too much time to think about it. Thinking hurts, anyways. 

“Sadie,” the nurse repeats contemplatively. “Oh, do you mean the girl that came with you here? Yes, of course. I’ll let her know you’re awake.”

With that, the nurse unstraps the blood pressure monitor and hangs it on the wall before slipping out the door, letting it drift shut with a quiet  _ click. _

His mind wanders. They had been so stupid. It had been going so  _ well. _ To be felled by a stupid, a stupid  _ cliff,  _ of all things? They had been fighting a  _ siren.  _ A siren with nails the length of hammers and teeth that had reflected the light of their headlamps, and  _ tripping _ was what would set him back? This is stupid. Stupid, stupid, his head hurts. 

The door opens again, and it’s the same nurse with a wild-eyed Sadie in tow. They two exchange a few words that Oliver doesn’t feel like straining to hear or understand, and so he just waits until Sadie steps fully into the room and the nurse shuts the door behind her.

It’s silent. Painfully silent, Oliver thinks, until Sadie toothily grins, wiping at her eyes. 

“You’re a crackhead, do you know that?”

At this, Oliver laughs, and the tension is broken. “And why’s that?” His voice is soft, but he’s smiling, and his head stops hurting, if only for a second.

“You had me so worried. I had to kill that fucking thing myself because you fell, and worried myself sick, got so muddy trying to slide down that slope after you, only to find out you weren’t even concussed. Stupid ass.” Sadie’s laughing. “You know, I researched concussions while I was waiting for you. I was worried you wouldn’t even know who I was. “I thought you were gonna have fucking  _ amnesia. _ ”

“That’s a little dramatic.”

Sadie balks and rushes to defend herself, assuring him that no, it was most certainly not dramatic given the scenario, and then she jabs at him again for being taken down by  _ tripping  _ of all things, and she eventually sneaks some snacks in from the vending machines down the hall, and everything is fine.

Everything is fine, but when Oliver sits in Sadie’s car that night on the way back to his dorm, his head still pounds. There’s a weight in his chest he can’t describe, and his head hurts too much to think too much about it.

Everything is fine.

———————————

Recently, Oliver feels the days are passing by  _ too _ quickly. 

Finals are coming up, charging at him, sending study guides and worksheets and reviews at him in some offensive mockery of a warning strike, a pitiful attempt at one given how severe his anxiety felt, really, and Oliver feels like he can’t catch up fast enough. He dashes between labs and study sessions and visits to Sadie’s dorm because finals don’t wait, but neither do monsters prowling the streets. He’s moving too slow. He’s also slow to get used to… whatever this  _ thing  _ is that he has with Sadie Marks. 

Well. It’s not that kind of  _ thing.  _ At least he doesn’t think it is? Does he want it to be? That’s still something he’s working through, been thinking about ever since that close call. 

No, he’s just referring to the schedule that they seem to have established.

His grades are starting to reflect his moonlighting occupation, his marks hanging on by a thread just like his sense of normalcy seems to be sometimes. 

Sadie’s voice next to him rings in his ears. The radio is turned down considerably from what it was just about 45 minutes ago, when the two of them were driving out in the middle of nowhere, to hunt down another shapeshifter, blasting classic rock and not thinking about anything other than the prioritized task at hand. Now, however, at—he takes a quick glance at the neon green numbers on the radio in his truck—half past three, Oliver wants nothing more than silence to calm the aches in his joints and anxieties in his brain. 

The road blends in with the towering trees that line it on either side, and the sky above them is no different, Oliver’s entire windshield a screen of black, black, black, and perhaps the only thing keeping him awake is watching the yellow lines zip by on the tar, and Sadie’s voice ringing in his ears. He is quiet the entire ride home, and blessedly, Sadie does not make a point to inquire about it until he pulls up into her gravel driveway. She turns to him pointedly, a question already brewing in her expression, but Oliver beats her to it:

“Sadie, do you think—do you still think this is worth it?” 

She cocks her head from her position next to him in the passenger seat, and the gesture looks so much like a puppy, so innocent, that Oliver actually kind of smiles sheepishly through his sleepy stupor and continues, feels like he’s justifying himself: “Yeah, you know, you know, like—should we still be  _ doing _ this?”

She must think he’s joking. His smile isn’t helping him look serious. “O _ li _ , how can you say that? That was so badass! We’re on a high, my darling!” She claps a hand on his shoulder, which hurts a lot, his arm throbbing. “This is two weeks in a row we’ve gotten a shifter. We should be close to finding the last of them and getting them out of here for good.”

“Okay, okay, but,” he says around a laugh, but he doesn’t mean to. He shrugs off her hand. “But what are we going to do after that? Do we keep going?” He ignores Sadie’s eager ‘yes!’ and continues over her voice. “Do we keep doing this until we graduate? Until I go to med school? Until I hopefully pass the MCAT, move out of this town and hopefully get into any fucking med school that will take me?” The words are spilling out from his mouth, unbidden, desperate but not truly angry, and even if he wanted to stop them, he’s not sure he could. “My finals are coming up, and I’ve barely had any time to study, and I’m probably going to fail O-chem, and how long are we going to be doing this? How long before—”

He stops, taking a breath. The silence sinks into his skin, makes his nerves fire on all cylinders. He wants to be anywhere other than here, now. The words on his tongue are searing, and if he doesn’t let go of them now, they’ll suffocate him.

“How long are we going to do this until one of us  _ dies _ , Sadie?”

“We haven’t died yet, have we?” she counters immediately, his implications failing to land, and her voice is full of quiet intensity - which, with Sadie, just means normal-speaking-level intensity. “And what, you’re just going to leave this town to the road? Leave it to whatever monster comes next? Leave me—your neighbors to die? Who else can do what we do, Oliver?”

His heart pangs. He hates this, hates it. His fingers clench around the steering wheel, and the engine whirring in his old pickup revs as he subconsciously presses on the gas, just a bit. “I don’t know, Sadie, maybe people who have actual training with this sort of—”

“ _ Who, Oliver?!” _

_ “I don’t know, okay?  _ Someone who isn’t us, for starters, maybe?”

“Are you scared of this? Is that it?” Oliver tries to bark in a quick ‘yes!’ but she continues, ignoring his voice. “Shouldering your problems off to the next schmuck who knows how to poke a spear in something? There’s no one else like us! We’re the only ones that can do anything about this!”

“Why, though, Sadie? Why so secretive? If all I’m doing is poking spears in things, then surely someone else can do what I’m doing.” His words burn, and they’re coated with a venom that he doesn’t recognize.

They both fall silent again. The tension in the air is palpable, and for some reason, the only thing that comes to Oliver’s mind as he gropes for an answer through his seething anger is O-chem equations. 

He almost jumps at the sound of his passenger door opening, a rough and quiet— _ actually  _ quiet—“ _ good luck on your finals _ ” breezing through the air and across the hum of his air conditioner to reach his ears, and then the door is slammed shut.

Oliver’s quick. Always has been. And he’s quick to leave Sadie Marks’ driveway. 

———————————

The next days crawl by slowly. 

The last weeks of the semester are inundated with a specific type of loneliness and anxiety that Oliver can only seem to describe as “unsettling.” It is a strange feeling, he thinks, to sit in his dorm spending an hour on one question in his review packet, burning through enough packs of RedBull that would make his mom worry about his cardiovascular health, forcing himself to stay awake until hours of the morning that most people at this university have never seen - at least, he doesn’t think so; he knows some humanities majors that have never been up past two prior to this semester—all of this while holding the knowledge that he does. The knowledge that while he toils away in his dorm, there are things going bump in the night, things with claws and teeth and things that  _ hurt  _ people, that he has the power to take care of. 

He slumps back in his desk chair, looks at the clock in the corner of his computer screen.  _ 3:26.  _ A chill goes down his shoulder blades. Oliver realizes with an acute discomfort that he has been sitting in the same place, the same position for hours. He stretches, arches his back and winces a bit at the painful snapping noise his spine makes. He tries to ignore the silence where a disgusted complaint at him contorting his bones back into place would usually go. 

He realizes, again with an acute discomfort, that he needs to be outside. An urge to be somewhere else. An urge that he satisfies by grabbing his keys and rushing out the door, into the parking lot, into his truck, and speeding off wherever he feels like, wherever his hand itches to turn on the blinker. 

It’s not a surprise to him that Oliver ends up in the park, the sole car in the whole acreage besides another in the distance that probably belongs to someone in one of the nearby houses. Honestly, it’s less of a park and more of just a wide open field bordered by some woods. It’s innocent enough in the daytime; there’s some old playground equipment in the corner nearest the road, a track that runs the whole mile and a half around the perimeter that never sees any foot traffic—most people prefer to take the trails that run around campus, no one goes by the woods in the middle of nowhere, because who knows what could be in the woods? Snakes? Spiders?

Oliver half laughs to himself.

He turns off the ignition and goes to the truck bed, noticing sourly that the latches are undone. When he reaches for his pole, a rusty chain-link fence pole they’d found in the woods during a hunt all those months ago, a rusty pole with a hunting dagger duct-taped to it, the lack of a bat lying next to it makes Oliver’s blood boil in a weird, unfamiliar way.  _ She’d be so angry,  _ he thinks, pulling on his jacket and taking first steps into the woods that know him so well. Some part of him hopes he runs into something interesting, maybe something he’s already fought, something he can just poke a spear in and be done with it, get back to doing chemistry or whatever he was doing not twenty minutes ago. He needs something cathartic.

The ground underneath him crunches and growls, leaves and twigs snapping like his spine. He can see his breath in the air in the light from his headlamp, the beam carving a path through the utter darkness perpetrated by a pure, new moon. Oliver plods forward in the underbrush for, by his estimate, about five minutes before he halts, the foliage kicking up under his abrupt stop. He lets the tip of his spear drop to the ground, arching his neck upwards and squeezing his eyes shut in exasperation. What is he doing? This is stupid. This is  _ so _ stupid, he’s in the middle of the woods with nothing but a pole with a knife taped to it, he’s wearing a headlamp for God’s sake, and he’s  _ actively hoping  _ that something supernatural will jump out at him and cure his bout of restlessness. This is stupid.

It’s time for him to go back home. It’s time for him to get back to studying, to put this whole monster-hunting business behind him because it’s dangerous and objectively ridiculous, and the sound of growling and scuffling and a voice grunting with effort in the near distance is, decidedly, not his business.

His eyes shoot open and Oliver is sprinting. He’s quick, always has been, and right now he is running harder than he ever has. 

It’s not long before a chimera, a chimera the size of a bear (Oliver thinks, he’s never really seen a bear in real life before, but he thinks this is the size of one, maybe) appears in the intersection of his line of light and another, pawing at the ground with its deformed features, and then Sadie appears, goading the beast with her bat, prodding at it, bleeding from somewhere on her face. There’s no time for formal introduction or discussion or any sort of rational thought. 

Oliver shouts, involuntarily, and the beast turns, surprised by the new sound. It plods towards him, and he can hear Sadie yell something to him, but her voice is drowned out by the noise of the chimera’s heavy breathing near Oliver’s face, the chilling feeling of its too-many-eyes staring at him hungrily, crazed, and his own anxiety. Time seems to freeze: the thing has antlers, paws, hooves, fur, scales, limbs poking out from all angles, mouths where mouths shouldn’t be. They’ve seen chimeras before—small ones, little rats unfortunate enough to mix with raccoons or foxes, not any bigger than the imps, their shadows in moonlight not at all betraying what they actually are. The biggest one they’ve seen is one that was primarily a doe. 

This was stupid. This was so stupid, he wasn’t thinking, this is—

The monster suddenly turns, roars in pain, and Oliver is snapped from his mind. Its neck is exposed, it is lashing out in defense, not paying attention to him anymore, and Oliver rears his arm back and jabs it forward, the sound of an old chain link fence pole ripping through fur and muscle puts a jarring halt to the sound of growling and roaring and quiets it to a slow, heavy breathing that eventually fades out. The only sound left in the darkness is the rhythmic inhaling and exhaling of two college students in way over their heads—and, for good measure, the occasional cricket chirp. 

The relative silence tears through Oliver. He can’t just  _ leave _ , but the idea of having to talk to Sadie again makes a thorn of nervousness prick in his stomach. He was such an ass, and she’s probably still mad at him, and if she’s not mad at him for the fight then she’s mad at him for being a hypocrite and coming out into the woods alone, or—

“Are you okay?” 

Oliver flinches and whips his head to the side. Sadie is now right next to him. Her voice is quiet with concern. He hadn’t expected that. She’s closer now, close enough that the thin stream of blood from the cut on her temple that goes down to her ear is reflecting the light from his lamp (it’s still wet, still fresh, it’s going to need to be cleaned as soon as possible, there’s gauze and disinfectant in the truck), and he can’t do anything but nod. She’ll probably need stitches. They’ve spent many nights coming up with alibis, excuses to get into the local emergency rooms without too much suspicion. They’re college kids. The practitioners there have surely seen weirder things at weirder hours. But something like this, Oliver thinks, he could take care of it. He’s practiced enough stitches on enough grapes, on enough oranges, watching YouTube tutorials religiously in case things ever got too sticky. 

The silence reigns again, and Oliver is only barely aware of her walking over to the chimera again and retrieving her bat, and then, his spear. He feels the cold metal being pressed into his hand, feels his fingers pressed around it, and then a jolt from his shoulder that feels like it’s possibly a hand. “Come on, Oli,” she says, a little bit louder this time, and it echoes faintly. He’s being pushed, pulled along, walked back to the parking lot. “You can fix this, yeah?” she asks. “With your bio major prowess?” 

Oliver refocuses his vision. His lenses have been vaguely fogged up since the chimera breathed in his face, and he hasn’t had the time nor the mental capacity to fix them since. One quick rub on his jacket later, he glances over at Sadie again. She’s grinning, no sign of anger in her eyes, no sign of betrayal or hurt, and it makes Oliver feel like maybe, just maybe, everything is okay.

“Yeah,” he speaks. Finally. “I can fix it. I’ll be quick, always have been.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading loves xoxo


End file.
